Word: imam
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Grassy Meal. At week's end, Prince Abdullah said he had not yet signed any concessions. The oil industry's best guess was that Prince Abdullah had promised one, but first had to go home to get it sanctioned by his xenophobic father, crusty, many-wived Imam Yahya bin Mohamed bin Hamid el Din, 77, called "the world's most independent monarch...
...Fires of Envy. The Imam's intense isolationism had at last been overcome by his avarice. A king who pays his chief of staff $153 month and his soldiers $2 could scarcely ignore the new $4 to $6 million airfield at Dhahran in the rival neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the $6 million a year that blear-eyed Ibn Saud gets from U.S. petroleum concessions. Yahya's Yemen has no oil with which to bargain in the bazaars of international high finance, but it is strategically located near the foot of the Red Sea, across the Arabian...
Thirty years ago Washington might have let the British handle the Yemen's invitation. But now the U.S. stake in the Middle East was vastly multiplied, and besides, the Imam Yahya disliked the British. He had even fought against them in World War I and subsequently managed to keep his independence, an extraordinary diplomatic triumph for a chancellery headed by a $22-a-month foreign minister...
...Imam's capital is Sana, an almost impregnable city (pop. 40,000), which had a 20-story building 19 centuries before" New York. There, in the hot morning sun, the Imam sits under the Tree of Justice before the palace gates, a soldier holding a royal umbrella over him while he dispenses direct and parsimonious judgments to his subjects. Most of them accept his word as the Koran's law but, just to be sure, the Imam keeps as hostages 4,000 sons of chieftains and bureaucrats...
...Cool of the Evening. After court the Imam rides through Sana's surprisingly wide, flowery streets in a horse-drawn coach. As the shadows lengthen in Sana men, women & children gather in the courtyards for the daily ritual and recreation-the chewing of the qat. They squat about brass spittoons (in the better homes) and tear the leaves of Catha edulis fresh from the stems. Some travelers have said that qat is an aphrodisiac, but a Yemenite philosopher has set the world straight on that point. "It brings rest to the body and ease to the mind," he wrote...